Lab Values That Matter For Athletes (and why doctors shouldn't do nutrition) Ep 148

All right, welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast.

I am your host, Coach Chris Newport, and today's topic is a fun, nerdy one, special lab values of interest, in particular for athletes, and endurance athletes, of course, 'cause, you know, you're our people.

And I wanna back up a little bit because when I first started practicing and I would have folks come in for nutrition consults, I would be giving them a list, like writing them out a li- like, "Here are the things that I want you to go to your doctor and ask them pretty please to order," because dieticians are in a little bit of a special bucket.

We cannot order labs.

We have found a little bit of a loophole to that, so now we're able to get them without necessarily having to, to go through y- your doctor because sometimes in defense of doctors, sometimes they can't order something specific because they don't have an appropriate diagnosis code, and they can't just be like, "Well, yes, wouldn't it be...

Sure wouldn't it be nice to know some of these things? But we can't get it through your insurance company.

They're probably not gonna pay for it, and why are we doing this anyway without a, a more specific diagnosis code," right? So there's that whole thing.

And then now we're getting into this age of direct-to-consumer labs, where you go through a particular company, I won't necessarily name any of them, but there's several of them on the market, where you're just like, "Okay, you know, let's get all these biometrics," but you don't necessarily know, nor should you know, what they mean.

And then if there's anything that's out of the ordinary, people generally freak out and they're like, "This one number is off," and then, "What does this mean? Oh my gosh." And then they're not able to, because why should they? They're not a healthcare provider.

They're not able to zoom out and take into account a more holistic view rather than just picking and parting one number that might be out of normal limits, when in my mind, I'm trying to work in more functional limits because you guys are high performers.

Generally, most of you are healthy.

There are other things that are obviously going on.

Some, uh, we, we work with a lot of celiac disease.

We work with a lot of Hashimoto's and Graves' and hypothyroidism and high cholesterol, whether it be genetic or not or whatever.

Every once in a while we've got some hypertension.

Uh, we've got fertility.

We've got perimenopause, menopause.

Like, all of those things depend on where you are in your life stage, what are your goals for your sport, and then what are the things that we wanna hone in on that are also related to your genetics.

So we've got all these different pieces.

So I think of labs as what are the metrics that we should be tracking on a regular basis, and then what are maybe some of the metrics that are more specific to you and what you're trying to achieve.

So all of that to say is that these special labs are special.

You're special.